Contemplative Photography: Chapter 10: Discernment

classroom window

The point of this chapter seems to be to encourage the practitioner to slow down, to not rush the act of image making, but to rest in the moment of the flash, building discernment and understanding what it was that captured attention.

“The key to maintaining the contemplative state of mind is recognizing the many impulses toward nonresting that come up.”   Such distractions amount largely to thinking about what was seen or thinking about how to make an image, rather than just resting in the vision and questioning oneself about what precisely led to the arrest of one’s internal chatter.

This rather brief chapter includes a camera-less exercise, Looking Deeply, which requires sitting in a chair in the middle of a room with a window and slowly investigating all the visual elements - color, texture, form, light.  The purpose here seems to be to train the mind to slow down and pay attention to detail. The authors conclude with the simile of the lute, here a violin, of tuning the strings not too loose and not too tight.

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